Article: 774 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Ralph Nader: Plutocracy and the Citizen Agenda for '92 and beyond
Summary: growing up corporate, we never think of what we own/is the commonwealth
Keywords: the plutocracy continues to take more and more control of what we own
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 15:11:20 GMT
Lines: 1267

Ralph Nader spoke to students at Harvard Law School on January 15th about
the continuing concentration of plutocratic power being exercised in the
United States. Corporate crime, corporate socialism at the expense of the
taxpayer. Why is this issue never addressed in Presidential campaigns?
At least read the following excerpts, taken from the speech starting 109
lines below this one, for a perceptive analysis of what is happening in
this country and ways to address it.

. . . "plutocratic power" . . . is really the singular index of
what has been going on, decade after decade, in this country.

. . . those people who have civic power accorded them -- freedom to
vote, freedom to speech -- if they do not use the authority that they
are empowered to use in a constant, daily, diverse manner, power tends
to concentrate itself and before you know it, you have a plutocracy
that uses the symbols of government, and the symbols of democracy, to
regale itself and to achieve legitimacy.
Now,
the avaricious triumph and spreading tragedy of corporatism
should be the singular, most important issue in the presidential
campaign. Part of it is an issue in the presidential campaign, but
only in an oblique manner. . . .

Now this is why I am standing in in New Hampshire for a write-in
vote for None Of The Above. I am up in New Hampshire saying to
people, after the groundwork is laid, "I am None Of The Above. And
I'm not running for president." This is initially confusing. But
later on it becomes invigorating. Because when people have a None
of the above option, and, presumably, giving visibility to a write-in
for None Of The Above will lead states to pass laws putting
None Of The Above, formally, or a No-Vote, on the ballot. That's
what they have now in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we should
not be too far behind -- or in Russia, the Ukraine.
When
there is a None Of The Above, then the No-Vote congeals.
It's quantifiable. It can be discussed. It can have substance lent
to it by those who prefer that option. It also is a silent third
party. Because the candidates will not only have to look at each
other when they campaign, they will have to risk the ultimate
humiliation of being defeated by None Of The Above.
Furthermore
a None Of The Above which is binding means that if
None Of The Above gets more votes than any of the candidates on the
ballot, it cancels the election and the candidates, and a new
election is ordered -- with new candidates. This might have happened
in Louisiana a few weeks ago.
Now
it's not likely that None Of The Above will too frequently
win, because there will be a reaction to it in anticipation of a
possible win by the candidates to broaden out their message and how
they interact with the public. If they don't, more people will vote
for None Of The Above. Remember please that half the people do not
vote in a presidential election, and sixty percent of the eligible
voters do not vote in congressional elections. So there's a big
constituency out there who for a variety of reasons -- and it is a
variety of reasons -- choose not to participate in the electoral
process. . . .

When we're talking about plutocracy, what are we talking about?
Here's an example of plutocracy: corporate socialism. That is,
corporations who get in trouble if they're important enough or big
enough, do not go bankrupt, they go to Washington. They are then
subject to a process known as corporate welfare -- entitlements -- where
their bankruptcy, mismanagement, speculation or corporate crime
generates losses which are socialized on the backs of the taxpayer.
This
corporate socialism and corporate welfare is booming. In
fact most of what Washington does is conduct a bazaar of "Accounts
Receivables" for corporate requestors. There are dozens and dozens
of corporate welfare projects that we can conveniently call "aid to
dependent corporations." Now look what this does.
First
of all it reduces corporations incentive to work,
productively. Because they know they're going to be bailed out.
They know that there are a certain number of banks in this country
which are too big to fail and the federal reserve had them on the
list: Citicorp, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guarantee,
Chemical, etc. In other words, they were too critical to avoiding a
domino affect and they would be bailed out. . . .

I mentioned plutocratic power versus democratic power . . .
plutocratic power exercises its will on us everyday. . . . The
plutocracy takes control of what we own. . . . Look at what we own:
we own, as a commonwealth, the public airwaves, the public lands, three
trillion dollars of public and private pension money, a trillion
dollars of savings, a half a trillion dollars at least of mutual
insurance monies -- all these we technically, legally own. Some as a
commonwealth, some as pooled assets. Can you imagine how our
political economy would be different, how our standards of living
would be different, if we controlled what we legally owned? And that
is never discussed in any political campaign that I have been aware
of in the last several decades. Can you imagine anything more
fundamental to discuss than the incidence of popular and commonwealth
ownership of assets?
Here's
how it goes: we grow up corporate. By growing up
corporate, we never even think of what we own. We never even
think of what is the commonwealth. We are told to go for it
individually and make a pile of money. And because we're growing up
corporate, our minds are anesthetized so they can be controlled by
the corporate ethos. . . .

The unaccountability of government has become a complex and
little-studied phenomena except a public grunt here and there. The
unaccountability of government has gone to the point where the very
use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The very use of the
law is the instrument of illegality. The color of the law. And it
has become so intricate, and so broad-based, that law schools don't
even study it: government lawlessness. Not just Watergate.

. . . democracy is like a tree -- branches, twigs, fruit, trunk, root.
The people are the root and the trunk, the elected officials are the
branches and twigs. If the root and the trunk do not provide the
nutrients, the branches and the twigs become very brittle and don't
produce fruit. I've spent all these years working at the root and the
trunk, and I'm not at all persuaded that the root and the trunk is
sending enough nutrients for anybody to aspire to become a branch or
a twig.

The Citizen Agenda for '92
Disolving the Plutocracy

Ralph Nader speaking at Harvard Law School
January 15, 1992

Thank you very much Ross, ladies and gentlemen -- it's nice to be
here at the Arco Forum. Was Arco a professor here? A revered
professor? With this rampant commercialism now that buildings on
campuses around the country are named for the corporations who fund
them. They used to be named for deans and professors who performed
in a distinguished manner in the past. But I can see by the
architecture that it does reflect the cold-blooded nature of that
corporation. Those of you who are somewhere way up there please
forgive me, I couldn't see you if I tried because of the lights. But
I hope the acoustics will reach you.

My discussion this evening is not a conventional one. It will
border, to some of the uninitiated, on tedium because it involves
important and fundamental redistribution of power through
constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and other changes in our
society. This is what politics should be all about. Politics should
address the questions of the proper distribution, balance of power,
between the various roles that people play in a democracy as voters,
taxpayers, consumers, workers, as people in political office,
elected, people appointed in the formal decision-making forums of the
judiciary, executive, legislative branches, in the trade union and
non-trade union areas, in the business areas and other sources of
activity and impact on the society.

Now, I suppose the best way to describe what I'm going to talk
about is first of all to use the phrase plutocratic power. That is
really the singular index of what has been going on, decade after
decade, in this country. Formerly we are a republic -- operationally
we like to talk about our being a democracy. There are deep
democracies and thin democracies around the world. There are
societies that call themselves democracies because their constitution
reads that way but everything else reads dictatorship or
authoritarianism. There are other countries that have democratic
roots, and custom, and tradition, rather than constitutional
enablements and prescriptions. Britain has displayed the fragility
of that foundation under the Thatcher regime. And there are
countries that have their foundations in more written fashion,
elaborated hundreds of times through judicial interpretation, and
that's our country.

But, what happens of course is that those people who have civic
power accorded them -- freedom to vote, freedom to speech -- if they do
not use the authority that they are empowered to use in a constant,
daily, diverse manner, power tends to concentrate itself and before
you know it, you have a plutocracy that uses the symbols of
government, and the symbols of democracy, to regale itself and to
achieve legitimacy.

Now, the avaricious triumph and spreading tragedy of corporatism
should be the singular, most important issue in the presidential
campaign. Part of it is an issue in the presidential campaign, but
only in an oblique manner. For example, national health insurance is
now being discussed. It was not discussed in '88 to any appreciable
degree; it was not discussed in '84; it was not discussed in '80,
or '76, or '72 -- yet, tens of millions of people in those years,
including millions of children, had no health insurance. And of
course there are other adverse effects of the euphemistically called
"health care" or "health provider industry," on them.

In contrast, years ago, energy was the big issue in the
presidential campaign in 1976, 1980, and now we hear very little
about energy, in terms fossils, nuclear, efficiency, renewables,
geo-political conflicts, pollution, impact on the consumer budget,
etc.

So what is the characterization of the presidential campaign
anyway? Is it the novelty of the quadrenial period? Is it whatever
the candidates think will play in Peoria? Is it the limited range of
the candidate's backgrounds? Is it what conflicts with their
campaign contributors priorities? What really determines it? You'll
notice I haven't raised the most important determinant, which should
be what the citizens instruct them, urge them, to talk about.

Now the reason of course, is that the citizens are not at a level
of expectation that is in accord with their true significance and
participating in a democracy. They have very low expectations.
Their expectations now, under the conditioned response of the dozens
ever-decreasingly significant campaigns, their expectation is one of
a bystander. Basically they watch the ads, they listen to speeches
and the slogans, And, if they care to, they will go to the polls.
And if they don't care to, because they can't can't conceive that
their single vote has any significance, or they adhere to the
philosophy of "que sera sera," or they don't like any of the
candidates, whom they regard as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They stay
home, is the option -- the only option -- is stay home, don't vote. Of
course, not voting exposes themselves to a characterization of being
apathetic, democratic dropouts, lethargic, people who are resigned to
futility. And not voting has no electoral significance at all, in
terms of congealing a point of view.

Now this is why I am standing in in New Hampshire for a write-in
vote for None Of The Above. I am up in New Hampshire saying to
people, after the groundwork is laid, "I am None Of The Above. And
I'm not running for president." This is initially confusing. But
later on it becomes invigorating. Because when people have a None
Of The Above option, and, presumably, giving visibility to a write-in
for None Of The Above will lead states to pass laws putting
None Of The Above, formally, or a No-Vote, on the ballot. That's
what they have now in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we should
not be too far behind, or in Russia, the Ukraine.

When there is a None Of The Above, then the No-Vote congeals.
It's quantifiable. It can be discussed. It can have substance lent
to it by those who prefer that option. It also is a silent third
party. Because the candidates will not only have to look at each
other when they campaign, they will have to risk the ultimate
humiliation of being defeated by None Of The Above.

Furthermore a None Of The Above which is binding means that if
None Of The Above gets more votes than any of the candidates on the
ballot, it cancels the election and the candidates, and a new
election is ordered -- with new candidates. This might have happened
in Louisiana a few weeks ago.

Now it's not likely that None Of The Above will too frequently
win, because there will be a reaction to it in anticipation of a
possible win by the candidates to broaden out their message and how
they interact with the public. If they don't, more people will vote
for None Of The Above. Remember please that half the people do not
vote in a presidential election, and sixty percent of the eligible
voters do not vote in congressional elections. So there's a big
constituency out there who for a variety of reasons -- and it is a
variety of reasons -- choose not to participate in the electoral
process.

I mentioned plutocratic power versus democratic power. Now
plutocratic power exercises its will on us everyday. It's important
to give a few examples because, when you're talking to students at
Harvard University, you are talking to students who, unfortunately,
develop intellectual rigor in an intellectual cage. And they too
often think they have it made by simply matriculating here in life,
and too often they're right. Too often it is the status, rather than
the substance, that carries you leaping over other more meritorious
competitors after you graduate. Because we live in a society that
gives Harvard University graduates the benefit of the doubt. They
even give Harvard Law School graduates the benefit of the doubt.

It certainly helped me when I was challenging General Motors.
People would say on Congressional committee, "Who is this fellow?
Why is he attacking American capitalism?" And some other one would
say, "Hey you better listen. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School."
Now if I had graduated from Cumberland Law School I wouldn't have
gotten very far at that congressional hearing. So you want to use
that asset as a source of humility rather than arrogance, so you can
continue learning even after you've gotten your diploma, which people
who blend uncertainty with self-confidence do the rest of their
lives. They do continue to learn. And people who just are very
self-confident tend not to learn after they finish their formal
education. They have year-after-year similar experiences that are
ever more lucratively compensated for.

Now if you were to have an exam over at Memorial Hall which asked
you the following question as a government major, `Would you a please
rank the fifty states in terms of their democratic quality (small
`d') and their democratic product. That is enablement and result.'
And you wrote that you really don't know enough about fifty states,
but you're going to establish the criteria for the quest. How would
you establish a ranking for Mississippi, Massachusetts, Oregon,
Florida, on that scale of being less democratic and more democratic.
Now I have never seen a single course in government in any university
in the country that exercises the student's minds in that way. I
took government courses and I learned all about John Locke, and Mr.
Hobbes, and the others, and sometimes it comes in handy. It comes in
handy. For example it stimulated me to describe presidential
campaigns as "shallow, narrow, redundant and frantic." (Instead of
"poor, nasty, brutish and short.")

But somehow there's an empirical starvation that associates itself
with political theory and commentary. The latest rage on some
campuses is Fucco. Do you understand Fucco? Disciplinary power,
sovereignty power, other kinds of power. I heard a lecture on it at
Princeton recently. It was a very logical lecture. She did an
excellent job of de-mystifying the occult. But there weren't many
empirical examples in the discussion. And that's the problem. There
is a language of avoidance that afflicts politics and politicians.
It's one thing that afflicts science advisory committees to the
government. It's one thing that afflicts faculty meetings. But to
afflict politics and politicians is really unforgivable.

When we're talking about plutocracy, what are we talking about?
Here's an example of plutocracy: corporate socialism. That is,
corporations who get in trouble if they're important enough or big
enough, do not go bankrupt, they go to Washington. They are then
subject to a process known as corporate welfare -- entitlements -- where
their bankruptcy, mismanagement, speculation or corporate crime
generates losses which are socialized on the backs of the taxpayer.

This
corporate socialism and corporate welfare is booming. In
fact most of what Washington does is conduct a bazaar of "Accounts
Receivables" for corporate requestors. There are dozens and dozens
of corporate welfare projects that we can conveniently call "aid to
dependent corporations." Now look what this does.

First of all it reduces corporations incentive to work,
productively. Because they know they're going to be bailed out.
They know that there are a certain number of banks in this country
which are too big to fail and the federal reserve had them on the
list: Citicorp, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guarantee,
Chemical, etc. In other words, they were too critical to avoiding a
domino affect and they would be bailed out.

Now the S&L's are a case in point. The government, under pressure
by the banking industry, expanded the deposit insurance to $100,000
per account (in 1982). It also allowed the S&L's to veer away from
their housing mortgage duties and invest money, with very little
criteria of accountability, in Equity Real Estate, which they read to
include, skyscrapers in Dallas and Houston, and in junk bonds and
other reckless investments -- certainly from a traditional, prudent
banking standpoint. And because these deposits were guaranteed,
speculators could take over a small S&L in Texas called Vernon
Savings and Loan -- boom! -- it's deposits by offering higher interest,
attracting brokered CD's from Merrill Lynch and Paine Weber and
others, and then proceed to put these monies in speculative ventures.

When they got in trouble, then of course they were subject to
being rescued, in terms of the deposits, by the FDIC or FSLIC before
it. Notice, the sequence: the people who have to pay for the
bailout -- the taxpayers -- are largely middle class taxpayers. Not a
progressive tax, specially suited for the rich and the corporate, who
participated, condoned and/or benefited from these capers and these
excessive interest rates. Yet the taxpayers are going to have to pay
for it over thirty to forty years, it'll total with interest over a
trillion dollars. They did not cause it. They weren't direct
beneficiaries of it. They were direct adverse recipients of the
resultant collapse in unemployment, real estate, etc. And they had
no say. See they had no say. The executives of the banks -- some of
them were prosecuted, some of them got away, some of them will never
be prosecuted even thought they're on the list.

Notice however: the taxpayers could not get any documents from
the federal banking agencies -- they were secret. The House Banking
Committee couldn't get many documents. There was no standing to sue
by taxpayers against this enormous requisition of taxpayer dollars
over the next thirty, forty years. They were basically shut out --
they weren't part of a democracy. They were supplicants subject to
the coercion of a plutocracy. This happens all the time in
Washington. Time and time again.

Defense contracts for example. Defense contracts are signed in
great secrecy by Pentagon contract specialists and McDonnell-Douglas
or General Dynamics. Most of the important parts of these contracts
are not public. They are amended in a format know as the `golden
handshake.' Whenever they engage in cost overruns, or, excuse me the
latest phrase is "cost growth."

When the taxpayers through the Pentagon pays $450 for a $10 claw-hammer
you can get at your hardware store, the vendor to the Pentagon
describes it as a "uni-directional impact generator." Well, when
you're getting $450 you don't say "a claw hammer." You call it a
"uni-directional impact generator."

This goes on, and it continues to go on, and it transcends
exposure. Now when an abuse transcends high-level, relentless
exposure, and still continues, you know how entrenched the plutocracy
really is.

1986 tax reform law, so-to-speak, small paragraph, which nobody
really understood what it meant because nobody read it. Hundreds of
pages in this tax bill. It was put in by a senator from the midwest
to benefit John Deere equipment Company, which was in trouble at that
time. But it was written in a general enough fashion that the
lawyers from General Motors and Ford spied on it, and within weeks
took advantage of it to a level of two billion dollars. The
provision -- the amendment -- was discovered by the Washington Post six
months after enactment of the law. Discovered you see? Even
though its on print. They are so esoteric, so abstruse, the
cross-references are so intricate that probing newspapers can take months
to discover this.

Back in the '70s twelve billion dollars of deferred profits on
exports by corporations such as Boeing and General Electric were
forgiven in a one sweeping few lines in a large piece of legislation.
No knowledge to the taxpayer. No challenge by the taxpayer. No
standing.

Energy bill -- last year proposed by Senator Bennett Johnston and
his republican counterpart -- it was going to open up ANWR [(a portion
of Northeastern Alaska's) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
--ratitor]
in Alaska and it was going to speed up nuclear licensing by cutting
out community participation, compressing the two stages of license
and challenge. But deep inside this huge piece of legislation, was
a forgiveness of an eleven billion dollars debt by the utilities to
the U.S. government for uranium enrichment services.

Now let's look at contrast. There's not enough contrast in public
dialogue. Let's look at the opposition by the Reagan-Bush
administration to a seven hundred million dollar infant nutrition
program, which was reducing infant mortality, which is a disgrace in
this country, in 1981. How about the few tens of millions of dollars
to make sure that fundamental inoculation programs are available to
infants in this country. The inoculation incidence for childhood
diseases among minority children in Washington, D.C., is lower than
that which prevails in the country of Botswana. It's at fifty-eight
percent. "Don't have the money."

The agency that establishes standards to protect children's safety
from household products is going at thirty-eight million dollars a
year, and dropping. This is for millions of children and all the
appliances, and ways they can get burnt, and cut, and harmed, toxic
and so on.

The agency that establishes standards for motor vehicle safety
does it, apart it from its highway safety wing, does it on less than
forty million dollars.

A B-2 bomber is running at 850 million dollars per bomber; its
radar evasiveness doesn't operate properly, and there's no longer any
Soviet Union against which it was designed. That is about what the
very controversial childcare bill would have cost, per year. Which
finally got through congress, under great opposition, threats of
veto, etc. See? That's the plutocracy.

The plutocracy is agribusiness in California which makes you pay
for their water, and then they make tons of money (great subsidy),
they over-produce agricultural products -- and therefore the price
would go down except you also pay for the price supports -- and what's
left over is in warehouses which you also pay the rent for. This
excessive use of water where it shouldn't be used in a wasteful
manner is increasing salinity and having other contrary environmental
affects.

Has that been on your mind lately? It's just a few billion
dollars a year. It's O.K. It's depleting the acquifer which took
ten thousand years to fill up in south-central Nebraska, Oklahoma.
These are profit-making corporations. They call themselves farmers,
they're agribusiness. Why aren't they paying the freight? Maybe
they wouldn't waste as much water. Maybe certain crops wouldn't be
in over-supply rotting in warehouses. Or taking a portion of the
twenty-seven billion dollars in price supports, very few of which go
to small farmers, under a federal agriculture policy that's driving
small farmers over the cliff and into oblivion. Think about that
lately?

What's the small talk on campus at Harvard these days? Does it
relate to matters above the belt, or below the belt? What do you
talk about? What do the law school students say? Do you hear them
talk about corporate crime? Saying what they should do about it,
taking stands, doing research? Or are they talking about "fly outs"
to law firms where they're wined and dined and considered for
partnerships preceded by six years of associateship?

Plutocracy conditions the distribution of resources. Poverty is
higher today than it was in 1960. Children's poverty in many ways is
even more dire. We have crack babies now. That didn't occur in
1960. Did you ever see a two-and-a-half pound little infant born of
a crack-addicted mother? Go to some of the hospitals and take a
look.

We have chronic unemployment. We have unemployment statistics
that don't count people that stop looking for work after a few
months. We have more homelessness. Housing is at atrocious levels
in this country because "the single room," that used to be place that
poor people and individuals lived, is at a minimum these days.
Gentrification, condominiums, higher rents, out into the streets they
go. Two thousand children are homeless in the greater Washington
area who have to go to school every day. That's George Bush's home
town. Excuse me, technically, Houston is his home town. But where
he lives, a lot of the time, is in Washington. And within view of
the White House, you see a level of poverty and misery that can only
be called "third world" 1960 imagery and content.

The plutocracy takes control of what we own. This must be a hot
topic and the Kennedy school. Look at what we own: we own, as a
commonwealth, the public airwaves, the public lands, three trillion
dollars of public and private pension money, a trillion dollars of
savings, a half a trillion dollars at least of mutual insurance
monies -- all these we technically, legally own. Some as a
commonwealth, some as pooled assets. Can you imagine how our
political economy would be different, how our standards of living
would be different, if we controlled what we legally owned? And
that is never discussed in any political campaign that I have been
aware of in the last several decades. Can you imagine anything more
fundamental to discuss than the incidence of popular and commonwealth
ownership of assets?

Here's how it goes: we grow up corporate. By growing up
corporate, we never even think of what we own. We never even
think of what is the commonwealth. We are told to go for it
individually and make a pile of money. And because we're growing up
corporate, our minds are anesthetized so they can be controlled by
the corporate ethos. Such a thesis is so easily proven that it's not
worth spending much time on other than to give one example: who is
raising our children today? Ask parents who's raising the children.
Children are raised by those environments in which they spend most of
their time.

Children today spend less time with adults, including their
parents, than any children in history. They are spending, pre-teen,
thirty-five hours a week on the average, watching TV, video
games, and in between, walkman audios. So for thirty-five hours a
week they are Pavlovian specimens. They are not engaging in human
conversation. They are not interacting with their their siblings and
their parents, except modest squabbles during ad time perhaps. They
are watching programs that convey basically three themes
relentlessly. Look at Saturday and Sunday morning TV if you doubt
that.

Theme one is violence is a solution to life's problems: zapping,
vaporizing, terminating. Theme two is low-grade sensuality
illustrated by junk food, turning their tongues against their brains.
And getting them to nag their parents -- which is the purpose of these
ads and the accolades are given to the ad writers when these ads
"have high nag factors" -- to demand that food with high-fat, high-sugar,
low-fiber, coloring, additives, etc., are purchased. Hostess
Twinkees, not apples. For desert they ask to purchase Hubba Bubba.
Tony the Tiger is the authority figure, not President Myier (sp?) of
Tufts University, a world-renowned nutritionist. Who knows Mr. Myier
among the children of America? It's Tony the Tiger. It's Morris the
cat. And thirdly, they convey addiction. Addiction comes in many
forms -- not just addiction to certain kinds of food additives, or
addiction to drugs, or to alcohol, or to tobacco -- it's behavioral
addiction: sitting there, letting their little minds rot in front of
that television.

That's whose raising the children. War toys -- five year old boys,
cosmetic companys -- seven year old girls, over medication -- starting
from almost day one.

Mother's breast milk is now replaced by infant formula,
compliments of the Nestle Company. Nowhere near as good. Kindercare
is raising our kids more and more, McDonalds is feeding them more and
more, and HBO-Time/Warner is entertaining them more and more. Pretty
soon parents will be obsolete . . . when they're around.

Now when you grow up corporate like that do you develop a critical
mind? Do you develop a civic spirit? Do you understand what
community is? Do you ever thirst for feedback? For talking back
to the TV set, in front of you. Never occurs to people to even ask
for an electronic Letters-to-the-Editor time on TV.

And what is TV? It's ninety percent entertainment -- including
ads --, ten percent redundant news, zero percent mobilization. But it
is our property. We own the public airwaves. That's federal law,
approved by the Supreme Court of the United States. We are the
owners, we are the landlords. The Federal Communications Commission
is our real estate agent. It licenses portions of the spectrum to
corporate broadcasting TV and radio stations -- they are the tenants.
They pay nothing for the rent of a TV station.

Some of the greatest fortunes in American history have been made
by television and other electronic communication company executives
-- tens of millions of dollars -- using public property free of charge.
The tenant pays the landlord nothing, decides who says what on radio
and TV, and laughs all the way to the bank, and because we grow up
corporate, we don't even think of challenging it because we never
heard of it. We never reflected on it. Our courses never talked
about it. We never majored in it. And therefore, we're
anesthetized. It's a controlling process.

The challenge in our country, in getting democracy upgraded to
override plutocracy, is not the challenge that is contained in
Orwell's 1984, it's the challenge that is contained in Huxley's
Brave New World.

Now, the plutocracy continues on. The candidates talk about
street crime -- it's bad, it's really bad. But they don't talk much
about certain remedies. Immediate ones and, shall we say, causative
ones. People who have work, decent housing, who have realistic
opportunities, who have health, who have certain decent comforts, who
have people who care about them -- especially when they're children
-- are historically, less likely to commit street crime.

Remedial ones are, there've never been more police -- five out of
seven of them are sitting behind desks, because patrolling is hard
work -- foot patrolling -- being part of a neighborhood, living in a
neighborhood, going to the neighborhood, and knowing the
neighborhood. That's hard work. Much better to be back at the
office in front of switchboards, computers, feet on the desk, or in
patrol cars. Zooming in when there's a crime, and zooming out quite
as rapidly. Leaving the terrified behind.

Where did we ever see a campaign that focuses not just on crime in
the streets, but on crime in the suites? Corporate crime -- at
epidemic levels -- read the Wall Street Journal, apart from its
editorial pages, and you'll get a does of it every day. Corporate
crime comes in many modes: occupational diseases, illegal
contamination of air, water and soil, bribery, and various forms of
corruption. Violations of all kinds of criminal laws. And there is
less money spent on enforcing the criminal laws in our country, at
the federal state, and local level, than is spent in six months of
catfood purchases in the United States. Billion and a quarter
dollars if you're interested in the figure. Six months worth of
catfood; billion and a quarter dollars -- not counting gourmet
catfood.

That is what the plutocracy wants. They don't want the emphasis
on corporate crime. They don't want to develop new kinds of
behavioral sanctions, deterrents. They don't want the Attorney
General to have a list of the ten most-wanted corporate criminals.
They don't want any research done on corporate crime -- go over here at
Harvard and see how much research has been done in the last fifty
years at the law school, on corporate crime. Compared to street
crime. Look at the index to legal periodicals. Look at the LEAA and
the justice department. Three or four, maybe a half-dozen reports on
corporate crime. Thank goodness for them. Not much compared to its
range. And more people in this country are dying, being injured,
being exposed to diseases, and being defrauded by corporate crime by
far than street crime, bad as the latter is.

Just think of the scandals -- equity funding. Twenty years ago when
corporate crime scandals were modest, 250 million dollars there.
Drysdale Securities was another 200 million. That's twenty years
ago. Today they're running billions of dollars of swindles and
fleeces. And they're not just the hard-core boiler-room type of
stock solicitation on the telephone. You've read about a lot of
them.

So much for the plutocracy, we don't have time to really go into
great detail. There are books -- a book called Corporate Crime and
Violence, by Russell Mokhiber (Sierra Club Books). There's
The Corporate Crime Reporter,
published by the same author every
week out of Washington, D.C. And there are other articles -- not too
many -- but that give you a flavor. I hope I have conveyed enough to
indicate that we do grow up corporate. We do grow up
acculturated according to corporate parameters. No matter how smart
we may be. No matter what scores we may get on the SAT or the
Graduate Record Exams.

What are our assets? Well look at what we own, but don't control.
Look at the redirection of investment, for sound employment at the
community-level, for sound output that three trillion dollars in
pension moneys can provide. Not to mention other huge pools of
money legally owned by people but controlled by banks and insurance
companies.

They took a trillion dollars of people's money to finance mergers
and acquisitions in the 1980s in the United States of America,
largely for empire-building -- not for any rational reasons -- largely
for empire building, huge fees for investment bankers, huge
emoluments for the corporate executives, ingoing, outgoing or
staying. And to top it off, these mergers and acquisitions often
strip-mined the acquired company, and bellied it up, and they usually
didn't create a single job or any wealth. One trillion dollars,
thank you very much.

Any of the presidential candidates talking about that? But that's
an asset we can recover. The public lands. The taxpayer's assets
are great assets. People talk about taxes mostly in terms of rates.
How about the assets they create?

For example, government R&D is half of the R&D in the United
States. Half -- science, engineering, medical. Much of it is given
away to private corporations, some of it under monopoly patents. Who
asked them to do that? Our representatives. To be sure, our appointees
at National Institutes of Health. AZT, clinically discovered for
application against the AIDS disease by the National Institutes of
Health -- your doctors, your taxpayer scientists. It
was then given by Mr. Reagan's regime to the Burroughs-Welcome
Corporation, a British firm, under a seventeen-year monopoly patent.
They turned around and charged AIDS patients eight thousand dollars a
year. They're now down to maybe four or five thousand. A third of
AIDS patients couldn't pay -- Medicaid paid, that means taxpayers paid.
So the taxpayers paid for the discovery, they then witnessed its
giveaway, they then witnessed its gouging price, and then they paid
for the Medicaid. That's a taxpayer asset.

Information is a taxpayer asset. Huge information databases in
the government that can be used for civic purposes, for justice
purposes, for consumer purposes. They know which drugs work, which
don't. They know what the side-effects are. Our health research
group has to assemble them every few years and put them out in
paperbacks. A little tiny health research group -- not the Food and
Drug Administration, or the Health and Human Services Department.
That's a taxpayer asset. It's increasingly being privatized. So
that Mead Data and McGraw Hill and others, in the information
industry, can resell it to industry, graduate students, etc., for
prohibitive prices. Increasingly graduate students are being
confronted with twenty thousand dollar bills that they cannot pay to
do their PhD. research with.

Highways are taxpayers assets. The plutocracy likes highways just
the way they are, They break down, crack open, a lot of potholes.
But it's eight to nine inches of cement and asphalt. There are
better highways that can be built -- six inches of cement, virtually
maintenance free, the highways breath, they have a plastic sheet
half-way in between so they breath in the summer and in the winter.
They don't buckle and crack. But it's less asphalt, less concrete,
less maintenance and repair. Who's controlling that taxpayer asset?
Look at all the idling cars waiting in line while there are detours.
Look at all the axles that are broken. Look at the wear-and-tear,
and the fuel waste. Look at the asphalt which doesn't have . . .
[tape goes blank here and then comes back in with:] . . . city office
buildings would be considerably lower. Reference for that? -- one of
the country's most brilliant physicists who's now working at Berkeley
on energy conservation, professor Arthur Rosenfeld. If you're
doubtful, write him, and find out.

We have a lot of assets. A lot of assets that are not in the
control of a broad spectrum of citizenry. So what do we do? We
start taking control of presidential campaigns. We don't let advance
people, and photo opportunity specialists, and other campaign
slicksters, completely shape the tempo, timing, content, locale, of
presidential campaigns, leaving us with nothing but a passive,
bystander role. That's the purpose of the citizen's campaign in New
Hampshire to which I recommend some of you might want to contemplate
volunteering for. A little card will be passed around, which
indicates whether you want to help, where, etc. Volunteer time and
talent. We want your talent and your time. To do what? To start
putting up on the front agenda, the new democratic toolkit for the
21st century. We are operating with citizen rights and remedies that
are anywhere from two hundred to a hundred years old. And we're up
against a 21st century array of skills and tools by corporate and
governmental powerholders. It's not a fair contest at all.

To give you an illustration. Two hundred years ago we got free
speech -- first amendment -- ratified. That meant that a big merchant in
Boston and a worker in Boston could get up on a soapbox on the Boston
Commons and tell it the way it is. Who could hear? As many people
as wanted to congregate, and as powerful as the speaker's voice could
be. Two hundred years later, a worker can get up on the soapbox in
the Boston Commons and say his or her pitch. But the big merchant
can buy television time and reach millions of people. There is a
decibel level quality to the exercise of our first amendment rights
due to new technology.

What is the tool? The tool is to recognize that we own the public
airwaves. We're entitled to have our own network, let's call it the
audience network. It could be chartered for legal purposes as a
non-profit federal corporation (chartered by Congress the way the Red
Cross and the Salvation Army is). It would be a private-sector
corporation, chartered by Congress, open to any viewers and
listeners, and the asset which would be returned to it would be one-hour
of prime time TV and drive-time radio. Therefore we will become
part of a communications commonwealth that will let us develop our
electronic literacy, and let us put on television what we want to put
on through a deliberative process that reflects great diversity among
its membership, which is voluntary, from entertainment to politics to
science to mobilization of the community. Doesn't cost the taxpayer
a cent, voluntary to the viewers and listeners, and it's our property
being returned.

Now if we had that, and if we had a cable viewer's group -- because
cable is a monopoly and there's a reciprocity that should be accorded
monopolies, and one of them should be the presentation of the cable
viewer's address and telephone number and description at least ten
times a day on all cable channels so the cable viewers can
voluntarily band together and organize and have their own staff and
begin feeding back the kind of programming they want.

If we just had that tool, the political campaigns would never be
the same again. We would be able to foresee and forestall problems
instead of confront them after they've erupted volcanically and
festered and damaged. We would be able to bring the best humane
value systems together with the best evidence and the best technology
to begin solving problems which we shouldn't have. Because the
solutions have been frozen on the shelf and not applied, we really
can't solve the housing problem in this country. Why are we the only
country in the western world without universal health insurance? Why
are we the only country in the western world without free pre-natal
care? Why are we the only country in the western world without
children's allowances? Even in the third world countries, they have
certain social services that are ahead of ours.

I was speaking to someone from Mexico recently from a town about
eighty miles from Mexico City, and they were calmly saying how they
went to the clinic when they were pregnant, and they got free care.
We don't ordinarily think of Mexico as being ahead of us in social
services. We better stop just thinking we're number one, and start
looking into the areas where we're not number one, we're not number
ten, we're not number twenty, in too many areas. We're 21st in
infant mortality incidence for example. I certainly don't think
we're number one in the way we manage our prisons. I don't think
we're number one in the way we treat the elderly. Try the
Netherlands, try Sweden, try West Germany, try Norway. That's the
tool, the communication tool.

How about voters? Your vote is diluted by money and politics --
campaign finance money, PACs. Your vote is diluted in a variety of
ways. What would be the new democratic tools? It would be to
consider public financing of campaigns, with a certain amount of free
access to radio and TV time by all ballot-qualified candidates. That
gets politicians off the auction block where they are now for sale or
for rent, depending on their versatility.

Not diluting the vote would also deal with the problem of the
one-party district. In ninety percent of House congressional
districts in this country, the elections are not competitive, as
defined by the challenger having less than twenty-five thousand
dollars for a campaign kitty to challenge the incumbent.
Seventy-four congressional districts had no opponent on the ballot of the
opposite party in the 1990 congressional elections.

It would also deal with the question of limited terms. Whether we
generically want to limit congressional, and other terms, as
presidential terms are limited. It would deal with None Of The
Above, statutorily established. And above all it would deal with
the direct democracy back-up when representative democracy is a
mockery. That is the initiative referendum recall which is in over
twenty-two states, and which together with electronic media access,
can become a much more potent force and accountability for elected
and appointed officials in terms of their use and their success of
passage: the initiative referendum recall.

The taxpayer rights -- this tools of democracy -- do you know that in
the federal courts today, the taxpayer has virtually no standing to
sue the government no matter how corrupt, fraudulent and wasteful the
activity. The federal judges now say, `you are only a taxpayer, you
have no standing to sue. Go home. You're not even going to be able
to try to go through the courtroom door and prove your case.'

The government buys almost everything we buy as a consumer. They
buy energy, pharmaceuticals, clothing, food, insurance,
telecommunications, and as the big consumer that they are, they can
leverage safety and health standards for all the rest of the
consumers in the country -- get more value for the tax-procurement
dollar, stimulate innovation, advance recycling, set models for
pollution control, further critical markets for solar energy, etc.,
without adding any more to the tax burden. Indeed, it would tend to
reduce tax expenditures by improving the efficiency of the
tax-procurement dollar. You won't find that discussed very much in the
campaign, even though, the procurement dollar by the U.S. Army many
years ago, brought us generic drugs over the opposition of the drug
industry; even though airbags broke through in cars, not due to the
Department of Transportation (which was controlled by Reagan's
anti-airbag White House -- would you believe he campaigned against airbags
in 1980? I guess it fit his definition of freedom: to give people
freedom to go through a windshield.), it was the General Services
Administration buying fifty-five hundred cars, putting out bids for
airbag-equipped cars for federal employees that brought Ford back
into airbags, then Chrysler, then the rest of them. One out of every
five people in this auditorium, on the average, will be saved from
death or significant injury some time in their life by an inflated
airbag. That's an illustration of the break-through power of
government procurement after eighteen years of log-jam under the
regulatory structure, influenced by General Motors at the Department
of Transportation.

These are the kind of tools. How do you organize taxpayers? They
should have a check-off on the 1040 return. I suggested that to the
head of the IRS in the Carter administration. I said, "Look, don't
you taxpayer input? Don't you want taxpayer feedback? Don't you
want taxpayers to take an interest in the tax system and how money is
spent?" So he said, "Well those are fairly regarded goals." I said,
"Well why don't you put a square on the 1040 which says `taxpayers
you can get a little pamphlet on how you can join the taxpayers
group, and if you want to add to your tax bill and join it with the
dues, the government has good computers and they can whisk it over
into a trust fund that will fund the taxpayers group and you as a
member will be the electorate for the directors and the staff. Why
don't you do that? It's just printing. It doesn't cost virtually
anything extra." And he said, "Well I'm opposed to that." And I
asked him why, and he said because he thought it would add undue
clutter to the tax forms. Those were his exact words: undue
clutter.

Now you can see where there are carriers that provide facility for
us to band together at our choice. The true index of democratic
rights is that they can be used by anyone -- it doesn't matter who they
are, how much money they have, what party they're registered by. The
true spirit of a person who believes in democracy is to advance
universally accessible rights and remedies. And we have all kinds of
carriers which we are not using, and as consumers, here are some of
the carriers.

If we're going to give legal monopoly rights to utilities, what's
the reciprocity? Recommended, that they be required to put a little
postage-paid envelope inside their monthly bill, that they send to
you. It falls out. It says it's not printed by the utility, it's
printed by the consumer group chartered under the reform legislation.
It says `Do you want to join this utility consumer group to deal with
electric, telephone, gas, water, environmental and economic issues?
If you do, send ten dollars and you'll be part of this group with a
full-time staff to advocate, inquire, research, organize, and
communicate.' Now that doesn't cost the utility anything -- the insert
is paid for by the consumer group. It doesn't cost anymore postage
because they don't use up their one ounce. It's voluntary for
anybody to join. And once they join, you have a countervailing
pressure, a collective community intelligence, that can move forward
on telecommunications and utility policies which involve everything
from nuclear power to satellite communication use.

Now this idea was proposed by us, and enacted into law in
Illinois, Wisconsin, San Diego, and, by referendum, the state of
Oregon. Along came the Supreme Court of the United States and ruled
that requiring a monopoly utility to carry this envelope -- even though
it doesn't cost it a dime -- violated the utilities first amendment
right to remain silent and not succumb to an irresistible urge to
respond to the polemic in this insert.

Now next time you take anthropology course and you hear some of
your classmates snicker about those primitive tribes in New Guinea
who ascribe animistic qualities to rocks and trees and totems, you
can stand up and say, `When it comes to ascribing animistic qualities
to inanimate objects, no society in the history of the world has gone
as far as our society has, in giving corporations these animistic
rights.' The corporation is an inanimate institution -- we're not
talking about the executives or the employees, they have flesh-and-blood,
human rights as any of the rest of us do. The corporation's
first amendment rights was violated to remain silent, and here it
is a monopoly, which contracts with lawyers, PR firms and advertisers
to propagandize consumers into accepting higher rates and then is
permitted by this same legal system to hand you, the ratepayer, the
bill.

Now this was too much even for Rehnquist who, in a brilliant
dissent, ridiculed and excoriated Lewis Powell, a former utility
lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, who wrote the majority opinion,
five-three, the decision. That will be turned around I think, in the
foreseeable future. But in the meantime, all of those government
envelopes that go to you, can be carriers for these kinds of
invitations so that we can band together, as bank consumers, as
insurance consumers, as utility ratepayers, and develop a community
intelligence and a countervailing force, to dissolve that plutocracy
more closely to the level of a true democracy.

What about workers? The NLRB is now a management tool. Those of
you that may have read that great little book by a Harvard graduate
called "Which Side Are You On?" -- it just came out a few months ago
-- it shows so clearly that, compared with other western countries,
industrial workers have very little right to organize anymore. That
workers can be fired in an industrial plant if they start showing
they want to organize a trade union. They then can appeal through
the NLRB, it takes an average of three and one-half years and is
costly. And by the time that comes around there's not much left of
the active worker's metabolism is there?

Now in Canada and Western Europe if the workers sign cards and
they vote -- it's a majority vote -- there's a trade union, that's the
end of it. That's not the end of it in the United States, and that's
one reason why the trade unions -- apart from their often unimaginative
leadership and too frequent corruption -- are now down to sixteen
percent of all workers in the United States are organized compared to
Canada's thirty-two percent. That's a very important reason, just in
terms of the right to organize.

They should also have the right to be ethical whistle-blowers and
have due process of law so they're not fired or ostracized or
demoted. They should also have the right to have some sort of
deliberative control over their pension money investments. It would
of course be enough just to have their pension investments disclosed
and what's going on by the banks, and insurance companies, and
corporate employers -- it's their money, they should want to decide
whether they want to invest it to feed the RJ Reynolds-Nabisco
merger, which was twenty-four billion dollars of capital, or whether
they want to bring it back to their own community in Gary, Indiana,
or Toledo, Ohio, in order to improve the conditions in their own
community where they live and where their money was earned.

There is also and finally the access to justice. We have now the
Quayle-Bush-Reagan trilogy which is trying to federally pre-empt your
right to have your day in court if you're injured -- in state court
-- against manufacturers of dangerous products: pharmaceuticals,
flamable fabrics, toxics, unsafe cars.

They don't say it that way. Notice the use of language. Mr.
Quayle says, "There is too much litigiousness in our country." No
data to support it, because the data contradicts it. He then says,
"These suits are frivolous." And he then says, "They are damaging
our global competitiveness." This is exactly the line of multinational
corporate goliaths who want to use the phrase "global
competitiveness" and "international trade pacts" as a way to drive
down our rights, remedies, and standard of living to lower foreign
country denominations. Lloyds of London makes no bones about it.
They want to destroy our tort law system and bring it down to the
level of England where it's almost impossible to win a case against
the manufacturers of a hazardous product, or even to get a jury
trial, or to get punitive damages, or to get pain-and-suffering.

Now most students -- even law students -- are not privy to this
important pillar of our democracy. Democracies have basically three
important pillars: civil rights, civil liberties, and safety rights,
broadly conceived. And the ability of people to challenge powerful
corporations and bring them down to a reasonable level playing field
because they have to be judged by a jury of their peers, and by a
judge subject to appellate review. And they have to disgorge some of
their internal files and memorandums that expose the asbestos
disaster, the Dalcon shield mutilation, among others -- those weren't
regulatory agencies, they don't have the courage to do that. But,
an injured worker, with a contingent-fee lawyer, can take these
companies on, and hold them accountable.

That is what is being driven into the ground. And attack after
attack by the Reagan-Bush regime is going unanswered by the Democrats
in Congress. When Mr. Mitchell comes here you might want to ask him.
Mr. Mitchell now has been politicized way beyond his fundamental
intelligence. He is fundamentally one of the most intelligent and
compassionate politicians on the scene. But he is now a prisoner of
the very power structure that internally he would probably like to
change.

He was the architect of the pre-midnight pay grab last July for
his Senators, who just couldn't make it on a hundred and one thousand
a year plus pension benefits, housing allowances, and perks a mile
long. Breaking the moral authority of the elected official at a time
of recession, stagnant minimum wages, corruption, waste,
unemployment, and instead of setting leadership-by-example they say,
`O.K. folks we know you're all suffering there, and we're running a
debt-broke government with four hundred billion dollar deficits, but
we just can't make it on a hundred and one thou' plus perks and
benefits.'

This is the same Congress that froze the federal minimum wage a
$3.35 an hour from 1981 to 1989, April, telling seven million
Americans that they can make it on seven thousand dollars and change
a year, but they couldn't make it on eighty-nine thousand dollars
(which was their pre-pay grab level). That's how they produce
cynicism, and turn-off, and revulsion. And they don't know that
political leadership's greatest asset is example, setting example.
And Senator Mitchell should be asked about access to justice because
I know what he believes.

He believes that people should have access to civil justice
systems if they are injured. He doesn't want to federally pre-empt
product liability law. And he doesn't want to restrict and regulate
state judges and juries. And he doesn't want to cut back on
pain-and-suffering like Mr. Reagan, who in May, 1986 proposed to the
Congress, that all injured people in the country, who filed suit
against the perpetrators of their harm be held to a maximum limit
of $250,000 pain-and-suffering for their lifetime. He did not say
that insurance company executives should be held to a $250,000
salary -- the kinds of executives who are making a million dollars a
year without any pain-and-suffering. He didn't put a cap on
insurance premiums. He didn't put a cap on insurance company
profits. He put a cap on the most vulnerable people of all -- the
political bully that he always has been -- on the most vulnerable
people in the country: paraplegics, quadraplegics, brain-damaged
infants, who are trying to get a little compensation and whose cases
would generate deterrents for greater care in the future by these
perpetrators. Ask him about it. You should ask.

You should ask yourself how little you know about the record of
these candidates. How little you know about their voting records,
other than that which they wish to tell you. The National Safe
Workplace Institute, a citizen group, run by a man whose brother was
killed in a construction accident, he was a Vietnam Vet, the head of
this institute, he started it in Chicago, probably the chief monitor
of OSHA. He put out a report two weeks ago ranking the fifty states
on their occupational health and safety programs. Arkansas came in
last. Mr. Clinton should answer to that. Harkin and Kerry raised
their own pay after Harkin opposed it before he was re-elected in
Iowa in 1990. He should be asked about that.

Their records should be common parlance for anybody interested in
participating in the civic culture. And it can't be done by relying
on them. They'll put forth -- obviously -- the rosiest picture, and
they'll tell you what they think they want you to know, and not
discuss their other performances and records.

Let me conclude on this point. No matter how well-intentioned
these candidates are, they can't deliver, and they haven't been able
to deliver once they're elected, because on one yardstick measurement
after another, out country is declining. Problems are getting worse
that were considered bad ten-twenty years ago. And they likely to
get even worse. Read the papers. Whether you are concerned about
fiscal deficits, health and safety, environment, worker rights,
consumer well-being, housing, infant care, you name it. It's not
getting much better. In many cases it's getting much worse.

The unaccountability of government has become a complex and
little-studied phenomena except a public grunt here and there. The
unaccountability of government has gone to the point where the very
use of the law is the instrument of illegality. The very use of the
law is the instrument of illegality. The color of the law. And it
has become so intricate, and so broad-based, that law schools don't
even study it: government lawlessness. Not just Watergate.

The challenge to you is two-fold as I see it. Do you want to
participate in this experiment of a citizen's campaign in New
Hampshire, and in Massachusetts, where there is a visibility given to
the need for a None Of The Above option -- a citizen agenda -- bringing
the tools of democracy up to the challenges that confront it, some of
which I've elaborated this evening, and to develop more self-confidence
among citizens so they can establish their citizen forums
in their community and summon the candidates and begin shaping the
campaign and vectoring out to the rest of the country in a more
genuine and authentic manner, rather than on the most polished
five-minute delivery of the leading candidate. So you can sign this and
the people who are running the campaign, the citizens, many of them
volunteers, will be in touch with you.

The second is a little bit more long-range. Think of what you
want to do in life, not from the point-of-view of the most available,
lucrative opportunity that comes before you. You'll regret it.
There are sixty-five and seventy year-old corporate lawyers in New
York, Boston and Washington, who've made a ton of money, and been
elected head of their bar associations, and have been described as
pillars of their community, who look back on how they used their time
with great sadness. Because they were using their time primarily as
secondary human beings, animated and absorbed by their retainers.
Not as primary human beings seeking justice under the law and shaping
the justice system in our country. Every occupation and profession
that you go into will give you that seductive opportunity to make a
lot of money, and then to look back with sadness on what you might
have been, and what you could have done.

The next fifty years of your productive life, are going to witness
either the most spectacular breakthroughs in establishing mechanisms
of peace and justice and human fulfillment, or the most spectacular
disasters of greenhouse effects, pestilence, famine and violence.
You want to take your pick: you want to work for perpetrators, you
want to work for victims; do you want to work for light, or do you
want to work for lucre? This is the time for you to contemplate it.

The dialogue on campuses today is disgraceful in terms of its
priority, in terms of its importance. And while the dialogue may be
of personal concern to you, remember the following: you're more than
just a person absorbed with personal concerns, if you want to live in
a world that spells humanity instead of brutality.

Bring the sources of secular power into your deliberations. Ask
yourself how corporatized has Harvard University become. Ask
yourself why Harvard watches inquiries that corporate university
contracts be disclosed. That the president of Harvard University
have a State of the Student address every January followed by
sessions with students in auditoriums to discuss the address which
would be circulated in pamphlet form throughout the student body.
Ask yourself why your roles are increasingly subordinated to other
functions, commercial in nature, of the university's players and
administrators. Ask yourself why you never have a day where you meet
the University's rulers. Do you know who your rulers are? The last
count was that there was seven of them. Can any of the students
state their names? Why don't you have a day where you meet them?
One would think they'd want to meet you. That's what they're meeting
for up there in that nice conference room.

If you don't know, if you don't desire, how to shape a university
subculture in a more democratic way, when you have great leverage and
great potential allies among alumni and faculty, it's doubtful
whether you've prepared yourself for elaborating the democratic
societies of the future which you would play a part. Thank you very
much.

some Question And Answers

Q:
Your critique of corporate control of American society has a
loud ring of truth to it and I think by injecting it into the
presidential campaign, you're performing a great public service. My
question relates more to one of political strategy, especially for
those people who agree with your views, than to the substance of your
critique. As you know there has been some speculation that you're
considering running as an independent candidate next November for
president. And I'm wondering how you would respond to people who
feel that by doing so, and by draining votes away from the Democratic
nominee, you might very well, however inadvertently, turn the
election over to Bush.

RN:
Well, I'm not running as a candidate -- independent or
otherwise -- I've made that clear up in New Hampshire. We're running
something that is described in my prior remarks as a citizen's
campaign focusing very heavily on the citizen empowerment agenda, the
tools of democracy, so we can enrich the quality of the campaign.
You should know that if I ever decided to run for office there would
be absolutely no ambiguity about it. The Massachusetts statute
allows the Secretary of State to put non-candidate's names on the
ballot, according to a very discretionary set of criteria (which we
don't have to go into now), so that that was the basis of which I was
put on the ballot. And I want to discuss these issues with people in
Massachusetts in the sense that that slot on the ballot represents a
certain set of principles and a certain agenda, and if it gets enough
attention and support, the candidates on the ballot, whose principle
quest is to get elected, will have to pay more attention. So that
subsequently in Washington, when all these citizen's groups from
around the country and their Washington headquarters go up on Capitol
hill and say, "We do want an insert in the Savings and Loan Bill so
that bank customers can organize and deal with mortgage funds,
red-lining, and prudent banking," the politicians say, "What? What was
that? We've never heard of that. We'll have to set that aside and
deliberate it in the next decade."

Q:
First of all I want to say I've been an admirer of yours for
over twenty-five years since the mid-1960s and I appreciate your
comments about government lawlessness which I think is very
widespread. One other comment before I ask my question -- we are
number one, we have a number one rating of the highest incarceration
rate in the world, per 100,000 citizens. And finally what could you
recommend to try to address the problem of government lawlessness and
hold our government officials accountable? Accountability I agree
with you is the issue. For example the FBI, police, CIA lawyers -- how
do you get to those groups?

RN:
You get to them from the top, from the bottom, and from the
side. You get to them from the top by having new political
movements, and parties. You get to them from the bottom by
developing community-based advocacy units that can resist and expose.
For example, the way the FBI got into the student files in the 1950s
and 1960s: through university approval -- there was no resistance, no
infrastructure of resistance there to expose it and to do something
about it which would have stopped it early on. And you get to them
on the side, by allowing what we call "government accountability
lawsuits" where people who have standing to sue can get the officials
discharged, fired, fined, etc. The only law now that would prevent
what permits that in a very modest way is the Freedom of Information
Act where you could persuade the judge that the withholding of
information was so outrageous by the government official that the
government official could be suspended for thirty days without pay.
That's about as far as the lateral challenge through the judiciary
has gone.

Q:
I like your message very much and I support a None Of The Above
option and thank you. There is a candidate who I do like who
is also on the democratic ballot, and his name is Larry Agran, and
I'd like to ask you what you think of him, of his candidacy, and
especially what you think of the way his candidacy -- and this is a way
of getting into yours and other peoples -- the way his candidacy is
being handled both by the Democratic National Committee in terms of
the debates, and by the press. I notice that the New York Times
even in their editorials refer to -- they don't even bother to use the
subterfuge anymore of the six, now five, major candidates, they
even said, the six announced candidates in a major editorial not
long ago.

RN:
Well I knew Larry Agran just after he got out of law school
and as some of you may know, he went to California and he was mayor
for a number of years of Irvine, California. But he was a very
unique mayor. He would develop agendas and connect with cities all
over the world in terms of developing a constituency of mayors facing
problems that everyone confronts and he was also always thinking,
always innovating, in the mayors office.

But notice what he's coming up against. In our country there is
permissible pool of about five hundred people who are considered
presidential candidates if they choose, themselves, to be. That is
members of congress, governors, former governors, and president and
vice president. That's roughly the pool. Anyone else is considered
a futile wild card or a self-aggrandized egotist. To use a little
redundancy.

Now the question is, why can't a former mayor of a city, with an
established record of some significance, be considered seriously?
Well, the platform isn't big enough, the table isn't big enough for
the debates. It's ungainly. Where do you draw the line? This is
what happens when we have to get on our knees and beg the networks to
give three or four debate opportunities for the candidates. So I
sympathize very much with him, and I hope that if he persists he'll
finally break through, at least on some of the televised debates, or
someone taking up his cudgel.

In past years people have said to me, `Who do you prefer for
president?' And just to make the point I say, `Ken Stoffer' (sp?).
They said, `Ken Stoffer?' I said, `Well, you asked me and I told
you.' They said, `Well who's he?' And I said, `Well, he started out
as a farmer in South Dakota, became a civic activist, ran for
governor (unsuccessfully), became chairperson of the state utility
commission, and has a lot to commend himself.' And then this
silence -- nobody wants to follow it up.

You, what they're really asking you when they say, `Who do you
favor for president?' is `Which of fifteen celebrities in the
political sphere, do you favor?' Now, do you realize how much talent
is being discounted with that attitude? Think of the people around
the country who have proven records of achievement, who are solid,
who are consistent, who are open minded. All the talent, and they're
completely precluded from running for political office because
they're not willing to go through this ladder from city council to
mayor, to governor or to members of congress, and play the political
game so that the politicians can support them. Or to be corrupted by
political campaign money. So they go around with marbles in their
mouth. So we really have got to challenge that convention that is
stifling the talent.

Q:
Do you have any specific suggestions as to how that might be
done in this situation to break the lock that they have?

RN:
Yes, well he did it by challenging the debate protocol, he
got on the debate. Another way is to demand that the other
candidates be given a debate themselves, even if they're not in with
the major ones over cable.

Q:
And your name, I understand it, is not included by pollsters.
That's another area: in polling they will not include certain
people's names and I understand yours is not yet one they're willing
to include.

RN:
That's not as important as mobilizing citizens and being able
to write-in or getting on the ballot. The important thing is that
the media has a very novelty orientation to covering the campaign.
For example, Jerry Brown hammers again and again on money and
politics and they get sick of it. `O.K. Jerry, you did it once, and
it's very important, we know that politics are shaped by money,
but, what are you repeating it so often for?' See they try to
portray a candidate as a tired, one-note candidate. And we all know
that most of the pioneering, social justice breakthroughs were
repeated quite often, weren't they, in American history? You want to
count how many times the case against slavery was made before it was
heard?

Q:
I've taped you, Bernie Sanders and Jerry Brown here. You all
read B.F. Schumacher's book, and I would assume that you found it
interesting and in fact quite applicable. Yet what I don't
understand is this: that if it's applicable to economics -- small is
beautiful -- why isn't it applicable to government? And in that I ask
this question: Would you support the bust-up of the empire, the
United States of America empire, as we have witnessed in the Soviet
Union, so that the ten or twenty or fifty nations of North America
could finally emerge and be manageable?

RN:
Well, let's see. Would I want Maine to be dominated by the
paper and pulp industry completely, instead of being able to be lent
a hand from outside of Maine.

Q:
Sir, I'm from Maine, and for twenty years -- from Augusta,
Maine -- I've been involved in politics up there, in fact I've served
on the PERT (??) board, for twenty years we were 49th in per capita
income. This past year we've slipped to 50th. What's the advantage
of staying with the empire?

RN:
Larry, the reason why I raised that is the following: is
that if you break it up politically and you don't break it up
corporately, you are making it even worse. The corporate government
runs the political government. And unless you deal first with the
corporate power, you are basically setting the stage for company
states and company towns, even worse than what you now see in Dupont
and Delaware or -- what's the name of Muskie's home town? -- Rumford,
Maine. I mean -- you know -- the corporations control the rivers for
heavens sake. The rivers. Riparian rights are in advance in Maine.
These paper and pulp industries control the use, diversion, daming of
the rivers. We did a book on this called The Paper Plantation a
few years ago.

By the way I might say that you're seeing more of these separatist
movements in Canada and the West, Quebec, northern California
counties now have organized to split off from California because they
can't get their say. But you wouldn't agree with some of these
people. You wouldn't agree with some of their reasons. Some of them
represent some pretty powerful vested interests, natural
resource-based vested interests.

Q:
Yes, you obviously have a lot of ideas and a lot to say. And
you also have a unique opportunity -- like you said only a very limited
number of people can be taken seriously as a candidate, but you have
the national recognition and national groundswell of support. Why
don't you make yourself a full-fledged candidate and therefore get
much more visibility for your campaign?

RN:
There's several responses to that. The easy one is that I'm
a citizen advocate, not a politician. That means that I don't like
to censor myself for my contributors, to begin with. The second is,
let me give you a little organic metaphor: democracy is like a
tree -- branches, twigs, fruit, trunk, root. The people are the root
and the trunk, the elected officials are the branches and twigs. If
the root and the trunk do not provide the nutrients, the branches and
the twigs become very brittle and don't produce fruit. I've spent
all these years working at the root and the trunk, and I'm not at
all persuaded that the root and the trunk is sending enough
nutrients for anybody to aspire to become a branch or a twig.

For a copy of this casette tape please write to:

Roger Leisner, P.O. Box 2705, Augusta, Maine 04338

Or call 207/622-6629 for a free copy of the Radio Free Maine tape
catalog, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope -- 52 cents
postage -- to the aforementioned address. Thank you and good night.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been
enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the
money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working
upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few
hands and the Republic is destroyed.